Bodacious beats: Kenyan musician, producer and DJ, “Blinky Bill” Sellanga simultaneously brought the house down and the TED audience to their feet with a lively, genre-bending musical performance. “My, oh my,” he sings: “What a wonderful feeling.” Sexual assault, social media and justice. One night, walking home from London’s Tube, Ione Wells was followed home, grabbed from behind, […]
Imagine you’ve been handed the biggest single cache of leaked documents in recent history. Eleven and half million documents to be exact, implicating important figures from around the globe in decades of tax evasion and hidden accounts. But you only have 26 people at your disposal to go through them. What do you do? This […]
Writer Anand Giridharadas has come to TEDSummit to share an open letter to his fellow citizens. Invited by curator Bruno Giussani to address the dismay and confusion many have felt in the week after the Brexit vote result in the UK, the American writer and journalist lays out a vision that is as honest as […]
Who would have thought when you left those high school math problems behind that you would one day be encountering algorithms on a daily basis? Zeynep Tufekci might have guessed; now an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information, Tufekci’s first job as a teenager was as a computer programmer. So […]
Do we have the vision and the energy to confront seemingly impossible problems — like predatory corporations, political deadlock, the wasted potential of millions of refugees? Session 5 rounded up people who are jumping right in. A call to action on fossil fuels. Costa Rica, climate advocate Monica Araya’s native country, gets almost 100 percent of […]
“I am British.” Alexander Betts says this, and pauses. “Never before has the phrase ‘I am British’ elicited so much pity.” Betts is here to talk about the June 24 Brexit vote — in which 52% of UK voters expressed their wish that their country leave the European Union. It’s a move that divided the country […]
Have you ever stood among the trees — those tall, stoic, magnificent plants — listening to their leaves rustle in the wind and imagined quietly to yourself that they’re communicating in some way? Perhaps in whispers, or hushed voices? It turns out that your imagination isn’t at wild as you might believe; Trees do, in […]
This morning’s Session 4 explored the ways we connect — the pathways our money takes, our communication, our trust, even our intelligence(s). Read on: Trust in your neighbor, but maybe not in your bank. Why is it that, despite being told “don’t get into a car with a stranger” for as long as we can remember, […]
“E pluribus unum” worked in Syria once too. The merciless six-year civil war in Syria has destroyed cities, killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions more. The Syria of a decade ago is but a memory. The causes have been detailed exhaustively — social, economic, religious, geopolitical. But one woman, an architect who […]
What are the tools we’re using to build the future? Session 3 speakers go deep on what’s next in finance, energy, business and the structures we live in. The next generation of trust on the Internet. For many online transactions, we rely on middlemen like banks and government to establish trust — but these systems face growing issues like […]
African growth is a trend, not a fluke, says economist Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. While the continent’s rocketship growth of the late 2000s has slowed, she shows how growth can get back on track if African nations lean into what the continent has been doing well — and address eight challenges that might hold back a better future.
In Session 2, our speakers debunked received wisdom, looked critically at common knowledge — and restarted conversations we thought were closed. Here, our report: Antique lamps, new sound. Brothers Ryan and Hays Holladay opened Session 2 completely unseen. In near pitch-black darkness, broken antique lamps lit up one by one — each perfectly matched with an electronic musical […]
Jen Brea was a grad student at Harvard when she got suddenly, horribly sick. Her four-year battle to get diagnosed uncovered a hidden bias around myalgic encephalomyeltis, or chronic fatigue syndrome.
The TED Fellows program brings together young world-changers from many fields, from art to tech to activism, and encourages them to mix and combine and think big. On Monday morning we heard from a representative sample … Graffiti’s unifying vantage point. Street artist eL Seed shares the story of his most ambitious project yet: a mural […]
TEDSummit is a gathering of TED’s tribes — our speaker community, volunteer translators, TED Fellows, TEDx organizers, partners and more. In Session 1, we shared mainstage talks that sparkled with optimism for humanity — now and deep into our unknown future. Ideas that stand the test of time. TED’s curator, Chris Anderson, opened TEDSummit with a throwback […]
What is a soul? Lesley Hazleton, an “accidental theologist,” prodded the TEDSummit audience with this provocative question, tracing the cultural, religious and societal origins of a remarkably intangible human hallmark. The body and soul used to be considered two equal physical entities — in fact, Descartes theorized the soul was located in the brain’s pineal gland. Meanwhile, […]